A Pearl Harbor Reflection

“Remember Pearl Harbor!” was the great World War II rallying cry. The sneak Japanese attack, designed to cripple the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet, would be labelled by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a “date which will live in infamy.” And yet here we are, 83 years later, and as I look around the various news and opinion sources I routinely follow, one could be mistaken for thinking that Pearl Harbor had disappeared altogether into the mists of history.

I find this sad, albeit understandable. December 7, 1941 occupies an increasingly remote place in time. We are, after all, far from the vivid images of the exploding battleship Arizona or the fireball engulfing the destroyer Shaw. Nineteen forty-one is farther from us than Lee’s surrender at Appomattox was to Americans in that year. Time marches on, as the saying goes, the “Greatest Generation” has almost disappeared, and those of us, their children, are ourselves well along into old age. Besides, the world has experienced no end of infamous days in our lifetimes and those of our children.

Still, I think that Pearl Harbor bears remembering, and not just by way of offering analogies to inform our current lack of military preparedness. To be sure, one can view our current national security situation as much like the one which existed on the eve of Pearl Harbor, with threats around every corner and a military ill-prepared to meet them. But leave that for another time. Today I’d simply like to share a small family anecdote from the day, and then take a moment to reflect upon its larger meaning.

“What were you doing when you first heard of the Japanese attack?” I suspect most every child of my generation asked this question of his or her parents. Our little northeast Georgia town was too small to support a National Guard armory, but a lot of the young men living there had begun, however haltingly, to try and prepare themselves for military service. A group of them, my dad included, had voluntarily created what they were pleased to call a “Home Guard” which exercised regularly on weekends. There were those who dismissed them as “playing soldiers,” and they lacked even a hint of official sanction, but no matter — it seemed the right thing to do.

On the morning of December 7, they’d scheduled a day long exercise with a couple of similar groups from other small towns in the area. Under the supervision of a couple of World War I veterans, they’d plan a simulated assault river crossing, with my dad’s group doing the attacking and the other town doing the defending. Apparently, the day went back and forth as both sides alternated winning and losing. Finally, the “troops” called time on a day well-spent, and gathered back at their cars to enjoy their sandwiches, cold fried chicken, and thermos-warmed coffee.

One of the cars had a radio, and soon lunch was accompanied by music from WSB, the main Atlanta station, whose reach extended across the entire southeast, including even out of the way spots in the countryside. Then, abruptly, the news breaks, and suddenly these young men found themselves asking each other where Pearl Harbor might be located. With rising fury, they piled into their cars and hurried home.

At dawn the next morning they assembled again, and, forming a convoy, made the long drive into Atlanta to volunteer for service. Reaching the recruiting center on Ponce de Leon Avenue, they found that the line of volunteers already reached several times around the building. Eventually, a sergeant came down the line, took their names, and said that they should come back a couple of days later — the center already had far more volunteers than it could process.

And so they did. It always meant a lot to my dad that he volunteered the morning after Pearl Harbor and that his induction date was “1941,” not “1942.” Having had some junior college ROTC and having worked in the auto parts industry, the Army decided he didn’t need boot camp and whisked him away to a job as a Quartermaster Corps clerk, setting up parts distribution centers at newly created airbases. Important work, and the kind of job that some soldiers wanted very badly.

After a year of this, however, he decided that clerking in uniform wasn’t what he’d signed up for, wasn’t what he’d been called to do on the afternoon of December 7. He wanted to be a “real soldier,” and, at the end of 1942, the Army realized, as junior officer casualties began to mount, that it was going to need a lot more infantry second lieutenants. Wish met opportunity, and he found himself at Fort Benning’s Officer Candidate School, and, ninety days later, gold bars on his shoulder, launched on a path that would carry him from Normandy to Czechoslovakia.

That this all started on an afternoon devoted to pretending to make an assault river crossing was an irony that he came to appreciate. The division in which he served, the Fifth Infantry, made a stellar reputation for assault river crossings, leading Patton’s Third Army across the Loire, the Seine, the Moselle, and the Rhine, among many others. At the end of the war Patton would write “you crossed so many rivers that I am persuaded many of you have web feet.”

Some 16 million Americans served in World War II. As a proportion of the population, that would be equivalent to nearly 40 million today. Roughly a million would be killed or wounded before the war would end — in far-away Hawaii, nearly 3,500 would already be killed or wounded by the time my dad and his friends heard of the attack on the radio. By any measure, this represents an abundance of Pearl Harbor stories, each different in detail from my dad’s, each very much the same in terms of their overall significance.

I don’t know the stories of everyone who was with him in the “Home Guard” that Sunday afternoon. I do know that in that one small town, there were paratroopers, an OSS commando, truck drivers, and sailors. The best man at my parent’s wedding, my dad’s best friend, became a P-47 pilot, was shot down during a strafing run over northern Italy, and spent the last year of the war in a POW camp. But if we don’t ourselves know all these 16 million stories, perhaps we can at least pause to recall a time when Americans could unite around a common cause, moved to common action by an event that reminded the entire nation that, regardless of its differences — theirs was a country worth fighting for.

And ask ourselves what it might take to achieve such unity of purpose once again.

READ MORE from James H. McGee:

Biden Visits Africa Too Little and Much Too Late

State-Sponsored Biological Terrorism and Multi-Dimensional Warfare

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A forthcoming sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges across the globe. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.

The post A Pearl Harbor Reflection appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.